Visual Studies

A picture is worth a thousand words, or so the saying goes. Yet however directly images seem to convey meaning, they are as complex and multilayered as literary texts. And they are everywhere. Once rare and seen only by the wealthiest and most educated, in our media-saturated world today they can be found in museums or malls, on the streets or the internet.

CCA's Visual Studies Program trains students in the skills necessary to analyze and interpret the images, objects, and architectural structures that surround us. Through a rich curriculum informed by both theory and history, students acquire a critical awareness of how visual culture is entangled in systems of meaning and power.

• How do images work to support or undermine political regimes, religious systems, and institutions?
• How do they encourage or discourage consumption?
• To what extent do they condition our understanding of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, abilities, and disabilities?

Degrees

Our program offers students the opportunity to earn either a bachelor of arts (BA) degree with a major in Visual Studies or a bachelor of fine arts (BFA) degree with a minor in Visual Studies by engaging deeply with such questions.

Curriculum

The Visual Studies curriculum at CCA is unique for many reasons. For one, it is richly diverse in its offerings. Students can take courses in the history and theory of the traditional fine arts of painting, sculpture, and graphic arts, as well as of film, photography, television, interactive gaming, craft, digital media, vernacular architecture, video, and performance, to name just a few of the areas our curriculum covers.

Unlike many similar programs, ours makes it possible for advanced Visual Studies majors and minors to enroll in courses in CCA’s Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies, enabling them to develop even more sophisticated interpretive frameworks. In addition, certain upper-division courses (Practicum, Senior Project 1, and Senior Project 2) are designed to provide students with nuts-and-bolts practical experience in writing, publishing, and speaking about visual culture.

These courses are taught by our full-time faculty and by curators and critics from the Bay Area’s extraordinarily vibrant cultural community who bring a wealth of professional and practical experience into the classroom.

Studio Courses

Another unique aspect of our program is that it is housed in one of the country’s premier art schools at which students and faculty alike are deeply involved with creating visual culture. We take advantage of that, because we believe that it is only through an understanding of how things are made that we can begin to understand how they mean.

Visual Studies majors thus take a sequence of studio courses alongside their Visual Studies and other Humanities and Sciences courses, so that the study of visual culture is enriched by hands-on experience with the techniques of production. Put differently, visual culture is studied at CCA not merely as abstract theory or a set of artifacts but also as a vital and evolving process that directly and tactilely involves us all.

Rich Bay Area Culture

Additionally, Visual Studies majors and minors at CCA can take advantage of the many exhibitions, lectures, performances, and symposia featuring distinguished artists, designers, critics, and historians that take place daily at the college and at other institutions in the Bay Area:

Asian Art Museum
Berkeley Art Museum
Contemporary Jewish Museum
Museum of the African Diaspora
Oakland Museum of California
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
de Young Museum

Notable Visiting Artists

At CCA alone, recent visitors include the artists Paul McCarthy, Mary Heilmann, Bridget Riley, Vik Muniz, Dana Schutz, John Baldessari, Ken Lum, Christian Jankowski, Catherine Opie, and Philip-Lorca di Corcia; Pixar animator Andrew Gordon; historians Donna Haraway and Maud Lavin; writer and publisher Dave Eggers; and musician, composer, and producer DJ Spooky.

Put simply, we have a virtually unparalleled extracurricular program of events that immeasurably enriches our course offerings and deepens our students’ understanding of visual culture.

Diverse Career Paths

Graduates of the Visual Studies Program at CCA leave with a unique combination of practical, theoretical, and historical awareness that opens the door to many possible career paths and graduate programs.

Our curriculum is especially well-suited for students interested in becoming critics, historians, curators, arts administrators, conservationists, gallerists, or cultural producers, as well as for those heading for retail, marketing, advertising, and other fields predicated on sophisticated knowledge of how meaning is produced visually.

Please contact chair Maria Makela (mmakela@cca.edu) for more information.